Awesome times in primary school

I just stumbled across this link on Facebook, a blogpost on the things people used to do in the ‘90s, and spending childhood in the ‘90s. It was a really nice read! Anyway, was inspired to list a few things that happened in my childhood, or primary school, that I forgot about but remembered after reading that random blog post:

1. Social studies textbooks in Primary School

I don’t know if people used to do this but there would always be this recurring bird/parrot(?) that would appear every two pages and that added entertainment to social studies lesson where our classmates would see who could spot the bird first. Never got tired of it hahaha.

2. The bookshops are always crowded.

The latest trends in school are always involve playing with items from the bookshop. Which include strings that you can form patterns with, I remember the butterfly pattern, the chopstick one, etc. It takes two to play this game, and somehow you’d get stuck, but your friend won’t mind and you’ll just start all over again, doing the same thing and you’d both not get bored at all. Amazing, right?

There’s also folding of stars, people would get obsessed with folding as many stars as possible in a day, or during recess, or any free time at all. There would be the metallic-coloured strips, or the strips with cartoons on them. People who were good could fold A LOT in a short span of time, while people who couldn’t get the hang of it couldn’t. Sometimes I’d end up pressing too hard on the folded star that it can’t be “inflated” when you try to push the edges in to create the pointed ends.

Then there was The Eraser Game. For my school it was mad buying of those erasers with the country’s flags on them, and I remember Yemen was supposedly very good haha it always won other erasers, somehow. But now I think it’s really just a psychological effect – anyone against a player with Yemen would have the impression that he’s going to lose, and so he does. It’s all in the mind!!

3. The Whiteboard

We had portable mini whiteboards, A4-sized, and I loved them! You could own your own marker and duster, which made you feel like a teacher, and a lot of people wanted to be teachers back then. And we’d play silly games on them, like matchmaking our teachers, or classmates. Fun, entertaining, but quite mean sometimes.

4. Fighting for a chance to play the computers at the library

Everyone would get excited when the library was open after school because people could play computer games. There’d be the Dell desktops in the library and a variety of computer games to choose from, I remember a lot of people liked the detective one, but sadly I can’t remember the name of the game. You needed to queue up and competition was fierce because the games were first-come-first-serve. It was two people to a computer terminal, but somehow it always ends up with a small group of people crowded around the terminal, watching enviously as the game progresses and wishing they could be the ones playing too.

5. Autograph books

This has got the be one of the cutest and funniest things that happened in primary school. Aiyo it’ll be quite embarrassing to take out and see what you wrote (it’s not just me who wrote in my own autograph book right? The author has to introduce herself first right? Haha.) and what your friends wrote. It was really childish, and usually they’d start with your very nicely decorated introduction of yourself, your likes, dislikes, favourites (favourite food, favourite movie, TV show, colour, etc.) And you see names of channel 8 dramas popping up a few times – those days when kids still faithfully watch every episode of the 7pm/9pm show. I still watch sometimes, when the TV’s on in the living room. (Linxi tooooo :D)

And there’d be the friends list, the enemies list, and the POEMS PAGE hahaha it’s so cute I love that section! I remember people would write stuff like “Birds fly high, hard to catch. Friends like you, hard to find.” Yeah, me included. But it has no link at all…? Doesn’t rhyme too. But that’s what poems like these special :) When you’re young you don’t think so much about whether things make sense or not.

Oh I just found another poem, I’ve never written it before because it just didn’t make sense. It goes “I have a pen, my pen is blue. I have a friend, my friend is you!” Awwww hahahaha.

And, “Enid blyton I am not, so I cannot write a lot. Just three words, forget me not.”

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Too many already, the list can go on and on, and I’m sure everyone would have their own primary school stories to tell too. I miss Ms A. Tseng, the little comic series, the bittergourd & ladybug and of course close friends in primary school :)

One last thing! Reading Mary-Kate and Ashley was definitely a primary school obsession. Went to wikipedia them and the book series and realised that the three different series that I read in primary school were, er, three different series! For the longest time I thought that they were all the same series, just different parts, maybe? Due to the fact that all series had Mary-Kate and Ashley on the front cover. Haha.

This post has way too many ‘haha’s, ohwell. Relieving childhood is always fun and brings out the child in you. We’ve done so many dumb things back then but they are so, so special.

There are 9 more days to the big A’s. Correction, 8 more days. Keeping faith has been so important, and I’d really like to thank so many people for it. Thank you Ingrid, Janice, Huier, Yu-Jia, Amanda, for sharing in some point or another of my life :)